World Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction: The countdown begins
The Third UN World Conference on disaster risk reduction, will be held in the city of Sendai (Japan) from 14-18 March 2015 where the conference will seek to find an agreement on a successorto the Hyogo Framework for Action which was adopted at the last such Conference in 2005 within weeks of the Indian Ocean tsunami and which was attended by representatives from 168 UN Member States.
Among the 8,000 people expected to attend the 2015 event, heads of State, government ministers, parliamentarians, academics, NGO and other civil society representatives committed to disaster risk reduction and resilience will gather in the Japanese host city.
Preparatory meetings for local authorities including ICLEI, UCLG, UNISDR and partners of the Making Cities Resilient Campaign will take place on 13 March. A ministerial round table on urban challenges will take place on 16 March.
UNISDR Chief Margareta Wahlström said: “The 3rd World Conference provides us with a rare opportunity to forge universal agreement on how to build disaster resilience across all sectors of society. It is particularly important that we have a strong urban focus as we expect 75% of the world’s population to be living in towns and cities by 2050.”
The purpose of the participation of local authorities in the Conference is to discuss the implementation of the post-2015 framework for disaster risk reduction at local level and to show their political willingness and involvement to strengthen the resilience of their community and territory. Local officials will agree upon and endorse the declaration of mayors.
Please be informed that registration to the World Conference for disaster risk reductionhas been open since early December. For Local Government officials there are two possible way to participate at the UN World Conference:
- be part of the National Government delegation, for this local government officials need to contact national counterparts directly;
- be part of the Local Authorities Major Group for which they need to contact Organizing Partners which in this case are UCLG and ICLEI.
Local governments that intend to participate as part of the local authorities major group need to fill this registration form and send it to Mr. Mohamed Boussraoui (m.boussraoui@uclg.org) or Mr. Yunus Arikan (yunus.arikan@iclei.org) with a copy to Ms. Negar Solhjoo (solhjoo@un.org).
A METROPOLIS delegation will be travelling to Sendai hence resilience and disaster risk reduction is one of the core action lines of our current Action Plan.
Source: UCLG, WCDRR & METROPOLIS